Private Acts | The Acrobat Sublime

Excerpts from the essays in Private Acts: The Acrobat Sublime.

This book is a celebration of acrobats and the magic of the real. At the circus, acrobats dazzle and thrill us. What they do right before our eyes is remote from the everyday; it's out of this world. Private Acts: The Acrobat Sublime places these artist-athletes in a different light. It springs them from the tent and stage and looses them outside, to tease out the fantasy in real life, juxtaposing the landscape of the acrobat's body, stripped of costumes and greasepaint, with earth, sky, water, and cityscape.

Acrobats belong to a proud tradition, and a time before both digital effects and OSHA safety rules, when real people took real risks on a daily basis to entertain the rest of us. Today's circus is scarcely a blip on the cultural radar—and yet who hasn't heard of the wire walker who in 1974 danced between the towers of the World Trade Center—and lived? Closer to earth and under the big top, the luscious aerialist actually could fall from the trapeze and snap her neck. Beauty and terror, sublimely paired.

Private Acts embraces contradictions. Pairing old mediums—black-and-white photography and circus acrobatics—we aimed to create something strikingly new. We took away the glitter and flash and everything associated with circus, in favor of a pared-down aesthetic. We used still photography to freeze motion on an activity that is all about motion.…We asked acrobats to travel well outside their zone. We chose locations with an eye to common natural or man-made forms…. We photographed with available light and without digital flimflam. The acrobat is at the location doing exactly what she or he appears to be doing. Among the cornucopia of circus skills, we chose those with little or no apparatus. This simple approach felt true to our theme, but it certainly didn't make life easier for the acrobats. …We asked our subjects to repeat movements in quick succession; to invent on the spot; to do tricks on water, earth, sand, boulders, and soot-blackened gears; to rig from trees, rafters, and railings; to expose their bodies to fog, rain, cold, blinding sun, and clammy evenings, as well as coyotes, construction workers, and officious guards. Ignoring discomfort, the acrobats joined photographer Acey Harper in pursuit of the Perfect Image with a grace and generosity of spirit for which we remain astonished and grateful. ...

Today, few people run away to join the circus. There are more options and fewer circuses. But however expressed, the desire to break the ties that bind still burns. Who at some point doesn't crave a new script? For most of us, it's amorphous longing, the quiet desperation of those privileged with choices. Something about the proud defiance of the acrobat embodies that urge. Watching a body fly beyond its limits inspires hope.

I was lucky, stumbling on acrobatics. For me, it is both recreation and re-creation. It touches something that already lived deep inside me.

In an age of technological wizardry, acrobats are the real thing. They are not divas, superstars, or product pitchmen. They do not conform to commercialized notions of beauty—a world apart from the boneless-chicken bodies of fashion spreads. Every body is different, in type, appearance, and technical and performing skills. There are athletes and there are artists; acrobats aspire to be both.

At its heart, acrobatics is a kind of play that recalls the tumbling and daredevil tricks we all did as kids. It is play for play's sake. Does life just naturally drain exuberance out of us, abetted by a culture that is, at best, ambivalent toward the body? Instead of a source of joy or amazement, the body is viewed as a cracked vessel. Our marketplace culture mines for profit our chronic malaise. The circus may have passed, but the snake-oil salesman is alive and well.

Private Acts: The Acrobat Sublime is the opposite of a quick fix. Instead, it honors dedication, passion, and practice. It is not a circus but a celebration of the body at work and play. Acrobatics shows a way of reigniting the spark. With feet planted on the ground, we can still reach for the stars. ...

Call me a late bloomer, but I was well into middle age before discovering I could fly. On a trapeze, that is. I did it as a lark, which, once sprung, took flight as obsession. Now, after so many years, I wonder how I could have so badly miscalculated the early part of my life. Clearly I was born to brachiate. Although I hail from a long line of short people who felt safest close to the ground, some arboreal ancestor was at last having a say: Go fly!

More than fifteen years after I first climbed a two-story ladder to the flying trapeze board, this quirky activity still holds me in thrall, with all the thrills and chills of a love affair and none of the letdown. ...

Unless you happen to be a chimney sweep or a firefighter, climbing a twenty-foot ladder that shudders like a tuning fork can send the heart thudding to the stomach. On the other hand, like the old saw about going to the gallows, it greatly concentrates the mind. At the top of the ladder, I stepped gingerly onto a skinny platform that I shared with a teacher and one other flier. They moved slowly and precisely to make space for me on board. It was not a good moment to misstep. ...

Fortunately, in a crunch, my no-nonsense midwestern self took over. When the teacher held the back of my belt and told me to lean out—over the abyss—I didn't stand there analyzing the trajectory between fear and delight. I simply went dumb and did what he told me: “Stand tall; step off like you're stepping off a curb.” I grabbed the trapeze bar with one hand, stood as tall as a short person can, leaned out, released my death grip around the platform’s steel riser, and took the plunge. From my first swing, I loved the sensation. Gripping the bar, I was no longer five feet tall. I felt elongated like an arrow. As I swung back and forth in an arc, my spinal chain opened up, each link relaxing into extra breathing space. A breeze caressed my face and back. It was a rush—a surge of energy running down from the cables' attachment points through my body to my toes. It wasn't only my fingers grasping the bar; it was every fiber of my being. ...

I am not the photographer I used to be. I once used my camera to tell other people’s stories. I documented the facts of their lives. Good or bad, it was always limited to reality. Now, I tell stories without limits, from dreams and the imagination

I have changed my ways, transformed by unearthly visions: a trio of 25-year-old women, contortionists, bending their bodies into surreal shapes, each mimicking the other, in a silent, synchronized ballet of twisted beauty on the dry, cracked floor of a mile-high desert. Two men pressing and balancing their bodies together, creating fulcrums of flesh and power. A pair of aerialists, hanging from the rafters of an abandoned nineteenth-century power plant, one bathed in angelic light pouring through the torn roof above, using all her strength and grace to hold the other in space. I know these visions were real: I photographed them, and they are in this book. As the old hymn says, “I once was blind, but now I see.” And I do see now. Differently. Working with acrobats, aerialists, and contortionists has changed me

I was motivated and inspired by the raw courage of these young artists who daily searched for new ways to move their bodies. Each day, each act, and every performance was an opportunity to create a renewed version of themselves. Like them, I needed to find a fresh way to express myself. I reinvented my way of seeing

I like to think that when people see this book, they will start to see their own world in a new way. Certainly they will never view acrobats the same again, and I hope it will stir them to see new possibilities in their own lives. I do. My idea of photography and art is forever changed

There are no limits